The biggest change from last year to this is looking at 20 year net return instead of 30 year. They justified this by the general flattening of pay for workers around age 40.

There were two other notable additions to this year’s report. First is the best return on investments by major. Such a release of data can help to adjust the generally engineering-heavy return on investment in these rankings, as we noted last year. A few examples: Stanford tops the list for economics majors, UC-Berkeley is #1 for business majors, UNC-Chapel Hill leads the way for life sciences majors, while George Mason University ranks highest for humanities and English majors.